Are We Managing People Too Much?

Most of us were promoted because we were good at doing the work. So when we step into leadership, our instinct is to keep doing it — to check, to correct, to step in. More oversight, more meetings, more control. We tell ourselves this is what good management looks like. This is likely the style of managemet we have been exposed to. For a long time, I believed that too. I'm no longer convinced.

I've come to think that autonomy isn't the opposite of management — it's the outcome of good leadership. The leaders I respect most don't build dependence on themselves. They build the conditions where people can think, decide and recover from their own mistakes without needing permission for every step. That's a far harder thing to create than a meeting schedule, and it's worth a great deal more.

Let me show you what I mean with two stories — one where I got it right almost by accident, and one where I got it wrong on purpose.

The question I didn't answer

One of my managers came to me struggling. He'd been handed a new team and couldn't get them to engage with him or his way of working. The easy thing — the thing I wanted to do — was to give him three options and send him off to choose one.

I didn't. Instead, I asked him 2 questions: had he ever faced something like this before, somewhere else in his life? Had he ever watched another manager win over a team that wouldn't buy in?

He went away and thought about it, and what he did next I couldn't have scripted for him. He stopped trying to convince them with arguments. He spent real time with them. He got his hands dirty on the parts of the job they actually did, and he got to know each of them as individuals first. Only then did he make his case for a new way of working.

About three weeks later, he came back to tell me the team was completely behind him.

If I'd handed him my solution, he'd have owned my plan. Because I handed him a question instead, he owned the result — and he learned something he can use for the rest of his career. That's the difference between solving a problem for someone and helping them become the kind of person who can solve it.

The control I couldn't let go of

The second story is less flattering.

Years ago, I joined an occupational health firm, and I badly wanted to prove myself. So I held on tight. I monitored everything, measured outputs constantly, and pulled the figures every week. I told myself this was rigour.

It wasn't working. I got pushback, and — to my surprise — productivity actually dipped. I was too close to it to see why.

A junior manager I'd become friends with said it to me plainly one day: "Just let them do their jobs."

So I eased off. Instead of weekly check-ups, I started taking the figures monthly. I'll be honest about what happened because the details matter. The first month was about the same. The second was better — partly, I'm sure, because people were spending less time filling in sheets for me and more time doing the actual work. By the third month, productivity had climbed, and the further I leaned into that stepped-back approach, the more it climbed.

Now, a fair reader will challenge me here: maybe productivity rose simply because I stopped burdening people with reporting, not because I started "trusting" them. That's a reasonable point — and I think it proves the case rather than weakening it. The constant measuring was the problem. Much of what I'd been calling oversight was just friction dressed up as diligence.

That was the distinction I'd missed. There's monitoring that protects genuine standards — and in a field like occupational health, some of that is non-negotiable — and there's monitoring that exists mainly to reassure the manager. The first is part of the job. The second is just distrust with a spreadsheet.

So how do you know when to let go?

This is the question that actually matters, and I don't believe there's a formula for it. A lot of it comes down to judgment — to being able to read the people in front of you.

But I do work from a principle. I don't make people earn my trust by proving themselves first. I start from trust, and I withdraw it only if someone gives me a reason to. "I'll loosen the leash once you've shown me" puts everyone on probation. "I trust you until you prove me wrong" gives them the room to rise to it — and in my experience, most people do.

That principle is also my honest answer to the obvious objection: doesn't this only work with good people? Partly, yes. Autonomy isn't something you scatter blindly. You extend it to people who've shown they can do the job, and you pull it back from those who can't. The real judgement isn't whether to trust people — it's who, how much, and when.

A small experiment

None of this means disappearing. The manager in my first story succeeded precisely because I stayed close enough to ask the right question at the right moment. Autonomy with a coach within reach is a very different thing from absence.

So here's what I'd suggest. This week, pick one person on your team and ask yourself honestly: am I holding on to something here that they're already ready to own? Then give them the responsibility, the support and the room to do it their way.

You might be surprised by what happens. I usually am.